PALO ALTO — When your net worth is $25.3 billion, you can afford to spend $30 million to become your neighbors’ landlord. That’s approximately how much Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg paid to buy four residential properties behind and next to the gated home where he and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan live in the Crescent Park section of Palo Alto, California.

The San Jose Mercury News reported Zuckerberg, who turned 30 this week, is uninterested in knocking down the neighbors’ homes and building an estate on the combined properties (which is what Google’s Larry Page is doing on four adjacent lots he acquired in another Palo Alto neighborhood). Instead, in a bid to preserve his privacy, the Facebook CEO is leasing the properties back to his neighbors to keep out developers who may market them based on their proximity to the Zuckerberg residence.

Zuckerberg paid well above market price (reportedly $14 million) for one of them.

So how does this controlling move by Zuckerberg play with his fellow Palo Altans?

This post first appeared as “More on the Chan-Zuckerberg Wedding” on The Shmooze blog at the Forward.

Now that the world knows who Priscilla Chan is, she’s being spotted everywhere — including in a Chinese TV documentary on the country’s police force. Oddly enough, a short snippet of footage of Chan and her husband, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has shown up in the program highlighting how Chinese police use hi-tech methods to fight crime.

Loving a guy — even if all he wears is hoodies — is no crime, so it must be complete coincidence that the image of the couple strolling on the streets of Shanghai last March made it into the film. “There is a serious shortage in China’s police manpower,” the narrator said as Zuckerberg and Chan appeared walking and smiling behind a couple of officers. In China there is probably a severe shortage of people who even know who Zuckerberg is, let alone what he looks like, given that Facebook is blocked there.

This post first appeared on The Jew and the Carrot blog at the Forward.

The Jew and the Carrot doesn’t understand why people are so surprised that a guy who wears hoodies and jeans day in-day out is thrifty when it comes to food. Nonetheless, the fact that that Mark Zuckerberg and his new bride Priscilla Chan are anything but upscale foodies seems to have some commentators irked. We, however, are a bit surprised about something else: the couple’s romantic honeymoon lunch in Rome…at a kosher restaurant.

The NY Post dished out the snark on just about everything to do with the Zuckerberg-Chan nuptials, from the backyard ceremony to the low-key ring, to the even lower-key fare. “Instead of the fairy-tale ceremony of most women’s dreams, Chan wound up with a wedding in her own back yard that featured $7.50 Mexican food,” reporter Rita Delfiner wrote. Indeed, on the menu was food from local Mexican bistro Palo Alto Sol and Japanese joint Fuki Sushi.